Thursday, August 25, 2005

Bolton Comments the draft document for the Millennium Summit Have Leaked!

Way to go, Talking Points Memo. He got his hands on a draft copy of U.S. Comments on the draft document for the Millennium Summit in September. Here's what TPM has to say:

I have been informed that these are John Bolton's personal draft modification suggestions that appear on the document.

These suggested revisions are leaps and bounds more offensive, regressive, short-sighted, and dismissive of others than America's "bad guy" role in the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development.

In short, the document does the following:

-knocks out entirely the Millennium Development Goals

-continues to undermine collective efforts against climate change

-knocks out targets and timetables for all goals and objectives

-guts any efforts toward further disarmament objectives and focuses exclusively on non-proliferation, while both had always been important objectives in the past

-strikes the section that states that countries will use force only as last resort


-and oddly, strikes out the need to establish a legal definition of terrorism, which the Bush administration has previously stated is a requirement before proceeding towards a U.N. Convention on Terorrism.


Holy shit, folks! This is the same Bush and Bolton that hate the fucking world! Just going from the first page, Bolton strikes "at its core" from "We reaffirm the vital importance of a multilateral system, with a strong United Nations at its core, in order to better address..." Sounds like we're going to using a haphazard arrangement of bi- and multi-lateral treaties for resolving international conflicts, which betrays Bush's real desire to gut the UN rather than reform it. This is especially chilling when you see that they want to strike out anything making force a last resort. What is their motivation here?

This bears some serious watching. I'm adding this to the list of topics I'll be covering as the summit draws closer.

Posted by crimnos @ 7:51 PM